Just Another Casualty of Life
by Rat Mouse
Summary: Sometimes I hate this world I live in, but mostly that’s because I don’t want to deal with it.
1. Six Hundred Forty Five

**Soul Bound**

Disclaimer: I own my character not the universe

Warnings for violence or at least mention of violence and some other stuff I'm not sure about yet.

Rated just to be safe.

**Six Hundred Forty Five**

Sometimes I hate this world I live in, but mostly that's because I don't want to deal with it.

We moved again last week, my mother, two brothers and me that is. Oh yeah, and my mom's boyfriend came too, but I wish he hadn't. We don't get along, but that's not just because doesn't treat me like a daughter. I don't like him because I know what he's done. I've seen it with my own eyes and most days I wish I hadn't. Just like some days I wish I could go live with my dad, but that would be hard. He's in a mental institute somewhere. He went crazy one day when I was three and tried to kill me, my mom, and himself. He obviously didn't succeed.

Sometimes I wish he had.

I don't blame him, though, he couldn't help it. He had these powers that slowly whittled away at his sanity until one day the last thread snapped and with it so did he.

Most people think I'm crazy for forgiving him for it but I understand. Other than an ugly scar on my left shoulder and him going to an institute nothing bad came of it. Unfortunately for me, I inherited his powers, so I understand.

I'm already at the point in my life where I never want to sleep again because of them.

Which leads me to now, me lying in my bed, staring at my ceiling, contemplating why my mother has such bad choice in men and waiting for 6 am so I can start my way into my new school.

Dad wasn't so bad until he went crazy, but I think he was the only one. After that came Troy, he only gave my mom bruises and Marek. Then Carl, he gave us Kael then robbed a bank and shot two tellers. He's still in jail. Now there's Austin, he hasn't done anything too bad to us yet but he''s still done bad things. He killed a woman once, after he raped her. I saw it when I first shook his hand when I was 12. My mom wasn't dating him then so I never told her.

Unfortunately he's living with us now.

Soon after those unsavory thoughts begin to form I push my brain in another direction altogether, like this new school I'm suppose to be going to. Mom said it was a special school, for my special powers. I have a feeling she told Austin it was a school for kids with learning disabilities, a place that can handle my special lack of attention span.

We've never told him about my powers. We've never told anyone about my powers, not even my brothers know. It's not like it's that hard to hide, not like some I've heard about. Some kids, I've heard, can turn into something else or even sprout fire or ice from their bodies. Some have wings while others can walk up walls. But those are all powers that have some sort of physical manifestation. Mine are all in my head, well, mostly. They usually activate if I touch someone or something, so most of what I do is avoid touching. Not too hard, it just means I don't get hugged a lot is all.

My mom stopped hugging me when I was seven and told her she was an outlaw in a past life and blew someone up once.

That's what I do, I see the past, and with people I see, not only their past but their soul's past too. The longer I touch people the more I see, so you can understand that I don't touch people anymore. Though a person is a decent person now, it doesn't mean that they were all that good the last time they lived.

You can see why I avoid using my powers these days.

Though once I did use them to get a job palm reading at a summer carnival. Turns out it's easy to fabricate a future when you know someone's past. It made me enough money to help me buy myself a car last summer so I suffered through it.

The unfortunate side affect that stems from these amazing soul reading powers is that I can't stop from being in my own skin. Every time I close my eyes I see my past, and my soul. This is why I don't sleep anymore, every time I do I dream of one of my past lives, and some of them weren't very good.

I got killed a lot.

Again I shift my mind away from my thoughts before I could depress myself too much. This left me counting the white washed bricks in the wall next to me. Sometimes I count to get away from myself. Most of the time it helps, but it also leaves the impression that I have OCD. I don''t think I do, but counting still helps. I once sat down on the football field of my last school during lunch and started counting blades of grass. I got up to 1,687 before one of the girls sitting on the bleachers stopped me. She thought I was having some sort of weird attack because my eyes glazed over and told me to go see the nurse.

I try not to count in public too much anymore, but sometimes I can't help it.

I count 645 before my eyes slide close from sheer exhaustion. Tonight my dreams are blissfully absent.

I think my powers realize I need to sleep on occasion.


	2. Soul Reader

**Just Another Casualty of Life**

Disclaimer: I own my character not the universe

Warnings for violence or at least mention of violence and some other stuff I'm not sure about yet.

Rated just to be safe.

* * *

**Soul Reader**

Dawn broke and I was already awake.

I was inevitably lost in my count of threads in my pillow case when my mother came to get me out of bed. She knew I would be awake and only whispered through the door at me what time it was.

The day could delay no longer so it found me rolling out of bed to pull on some clean clothes and heading for my horde of poptarts, hidden from the greedy hands of my brothers in the back of my underwear drawer. I had long ago learned that to be the only place they wouldn't look for my stash of food mom wouldn't get them. Apparently touching something that had been that close to my body gave them nightmares.

What whimps.

Sometimes I wished that I could give them my nightmares just so they could have something real to complain about, but then I would remember that they were my brothers and I did indeed love them for some strange reason that escaped me most days.

So started my day for a new school I wasn't sure if I should like.

I made it through the bus ride by wedging myself in the short seat in the very back and ostentatiously refusing to let anyone out me from it.

Somehow, after that, everyone seemed to want to leave me alone so I was thankful. There would be no memories for me this morning as my fingers busied themselves in the task of pulling fibers out of the hole in my jeans then picking those fibers fastidiously apart.

My brutal decapitation of my jeans halted as a twin set of seatbelts wound around my chest and I was left counting the threads holding them together with such studious fascination that not even the sensation of my stomachs dropping away from my body could distract me from them.

This is what I get for going out in public places. Fear of touch left me feeling antisocial and skittish around those I did not know. Unfortunately this left me with the only thing that distracted me from my troubles, the counting.

The school, this Sky High, was a floating monstrosity that I only glimpsed as I stepped from the bus well behind the row of people that preceded me.

Why anyone would want a floating school was far beyond my grasp so I let the question slide from my mind as I focused on the people milling in the yard.

There were a lot of people. I was sure I stopped breathing for a moment as I took in how many exactly there were standing between me and the front door. Too many. I really didn't want to touch anyone today.

* * *

"What can you do?"

I stared at the man dispassionately through pale, dead blue eyes, contemplating just exactly what I might say.

"I read souls" the whispered words passed my lips as if pushing something like this between them might be torture. It just might have been, I wasn't sure yet, but I had never told anyone what I could do. Words like those were foreign on my tongue and had a strange thickness that I wasn't sure I liked.

The man snorted obviously not impressed, I wouldn't be either if I were him. It's not something nearly as impressive as starting a windstorm, shooting lazers out of your eyes or shapeshifting into the tiger the boy before me had.

Unfortunately for me he wanted a demonstration.

My left hand snaked out, against my better judgement, to briefly rest upon the bare hand he held a clipboard in. Flashes of his life filtered across my mind before my heart could beat twice and I had more that enough. My hand was snatched away as if from a hot stove and held protectively to my chest in an absent minded sort of way as my eyes lost their focus while my mind tried to process what I had seen.

"You still live with your mother?" slipped out through my lips before I even registered the thought and my eyes regained some of their focus at the whisper that seemed loud in the now silent gym.

"Alright, SideKick!" the man paled slightly while trying to shoo me off the platform with the aforementioned clipboard and another student was called up after me. I didn't pay them any attention, I was lost to the slightly disturbing image of a grown man gleefully devouring a stack of pancakes with a whipped cream face that his mother had made him.

* * *


End file.
